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This article is taken from PN Review 244, Volume 45 Number 2, November - December 2018.

Lobster Americans

‘Lobsters, Americans’ and other poems
Suzannah V. Evans

Silk, Poets

Silk coat, the sky. Sky blue, the creels. Crawling, the lobsters. Leaping, the mackerel. Making, the poets. Peering, the tourists. Tipping, the waves. Waving, the poets. Pining, the lovers. Lullabying, the dreamers. Dreaming, the sleepers. Swimming, the brave, Braving, the poets.

Still Life With Five Starfish, Two Razor Shells, a Twig, a Clam and a Frond of Seaweed

Five starfish, as if one for each arm. A symmetry. The shell is so white against the black-struck sand, almost spotless (only a flicker of sediment near its jewellery-box hinge: o -----). Next to it, a sand-coloured starfish: * Adjacent again, a bright white starfish: * next to a bright white razor shell: (or rather, half), itself next to a larger razor shell (the image too explicit, legs opened) stretched white, glimmering. A dream of salt. The pages of a book. Other starfish merge with the sand: *** arms tangled in an intimacy of seaweed. And that frond of seaweed: ~- - ~--- ~ ~ --- ~ ~, laid out by the sea like a bookmark, like the sea marking its place in the order of things.

Lobsters, Americans

Lobster pots in gardens, cackling gulls (a chick begging for food, catching the beak of its mother) roll of suitcases over the cobbles, caw-caw-ha-ha-mouette -mouette-mouette of seagulls in the air, mustard trousers ...

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